Lieutenant (16 page)

Not speaking had made things worse. He could see that now. Made it look furtive, when there was nothing to hide.

‘They have an artless charm, the girls, I grant you,’ Silk said. ‘And an admirable lack of coquetry. But Rooke, as a friend, might I just utter a word of warning? Hidden away out here, you may not be completely aware, well, the natives are—let me put it this way, the governor is concerned. Those attacks at Rose Hill…You might think to go a little carefully.’

‘Thank you, Silk,’ Rooke said. ‘It is kind of you to speak as a friend.’

Kind, but what could Silk know, reading his words through a lens of prurience, and making guesses that were so wrong as to be sickening?

He took the notebooks from Silk, got up and put them away on the shelf. Once up there between Lacaille’s
Stelliferum
and the
Nautical Almanac
, they were invisible. So small, like the first snag in a stocking, that could hardly be detected, that seemed not to have any importance. By the time the snag had unravelled the whole thing, it was too late to mend.

T
he earth travelled elegantly along its orbit, tilted on its axis—somewhat like the governor, Rooke thought—bearing the settlement into the full heat of summer. A week had passed since his meeting with Silk, but something in Rooke was still reverberating, a disturbance in the air, a tremor in his sense of himself.

He heard them before he saw them—
Kamara!
Kamara!
—Tagaran with Tugear and Worogan, almost falling down the rocks in their haste to reach the hut. No one else, none of the women, none of the other children. Just these three, landing at his door in the afternoon, breathless and crying.

‘Heavens, what has happened, what is wrong?’

Tagaran was in disarray as he had never seen her, her face wet with tears, her mouth shaking, air heaving raggedly in and
out. She was trembling like a horse after a gallop. He saw brilliant red blood on her arm and her side.

She panted out a stream of words, he could not understand a single one.

‘Get in, girls, get in by the fire!’

He spread a blanket for them to sit on, threw sticks on the fire. He had little enough in the hut, but poured them each a cup of water, found the hard old slab of biscuit that was to have been his meagre supper and gave them each a piece, leaving himself a mouthful. Tugear was sobbing, would not taste the water or the biscuit, sat with her knees up to her shoulders.

Tagaran took a deep breath to try to calm her breathing and was racked by an enormous hiccough, then another. She smiled crookedly and started to say something, hiccoughed again, and all at once the crisis was over, Tugear laughing and banging Tagaran on the back until she angled her elbow up to make her stop.

‘Now tell me, girls. What has happened? What is this about?’

Tugear and Worogan looked at Tagaran. She spoke, but too fast. He caught
white man
, all the rest was a blur.

‘I cannot understand you,’ he said. ‘
Mapiadyimi
.’

‘
Piyidyangala
whitemana ngalari Tugearna
,’ Tagaran repeated, one word at a time for his benefit.

In
piyidyangala
Rooke could hear a stem he knew,
piyi
to beat.
Even as his brain was computing the meaning, his heart was shrinking.
A white man beat Tugear
. He did not have to unravel all the implications of this to know that it was something he did not want to hear.

Tagaran was energetically acting out an angry face, a hand rising and falling. He could see it all, only too clearly, some outraged marine or truculent convict. For a moment he saw Brugden’s powerful shoulders, imagined his arm bent back to strike.

She showed him how the beating had opened a long cut on her arm and hurt her finger, showed him the long stick-shaped weal where blood was beading on Tugear’s back. She turned her face up to him, full of pain and outrage.

He cradled her hand in his own and looked at it, bent the finger gently and watched her face. It was not broken, but it was swollen. He picked up her other hand, comparing the swollen finger with the other. He went carefully so he would not touch the injured part, but she pulled back.

‘
Didyi didyi!
’

There was an accusing note to her voice, although he could not have caused her pain.

He leaned forward to have a better look at the cut on Tugear’s back, but she flinched in fear. Her face was turned away.

‘
Minyin
barakut
, Tugear, minyin?
’ he said, why are you afraid, Tugear?

Without looking at him she muttered, ‘
Mullayin
.’ Because of the men.

Tagaran pointed to the cut, as if he could not see it, or could not understand that it hurt.

‘
Didyi murri!
’ Something like, it is very painful!

Rooke could not stop himself thinking of that other back he had so recently seen.

Had Tagaran seen it? He thought not. But something about her manner told him that she had heard about it. He could not meet her eye.

She told him the story again, with even more dramatic gestures. Her voice was shrill with outrage.

Then she watched him.

Rooke knew what she wanted. She wanted him to ask questions:
Who did this to you? Why? Where is he now?
She wanted him to join her in indignation, to put on his jacket and stride away to the settlement to deal with the white man who had beaten them.

But there was a heavy place inside him, where the event was sitting undigested like a piece of bad food.

‘
Ngia muri
yurora
,’ he said, I am very angry.

But he knew that he did not sound angry. What he heard in his voice was a dragging reluctance, a withholding.

‘
Ngalariwa?
’ Tagaran asked, with us?

‘No! No, of course not with you!’

It was such a wrong idea that he looked at her in surprise.
Meeting her gaze, he saw that she had asked the question to make him look at her.

‘
Kamara
ngyini piaba?
’ she asked,
kamara
will you speak?

He had never thought that he might wish to understand less.

This exchange was not a language lesson. It was a conversation. For the first time, he and Tagaran were on the same side of the mirror of language, simply speaking to each other. Understanding went in both directions. Once two people shared language, they could no longer use it to hide.

‘
Nganawa?
’ he said. To whom?

‘
Charlotte
birang
,’ she said, to the person belonging to
Charlotte
.

Not Brugden, then, but one of the sailors. He imagined himself being rowed out to
Charlotte
, asking to see the captain.
Sir, some man from your ship has beaten three native girls, I wish you to
discover and punish him
.

The captain would look at him.
Really, Lieutenant? Native
girls, eh?

Some sailor or other would be brought up from below, would stand wooden-faced, the way they were taught. He would have the story ready about how he had gone ashore and the girls had stolen his bread, or his pipe.

He could imagine the scene, but not himself in it.

The girls were a tableau of brown limbs and angled faces and eyes watching Lieutenant Rooke trying to imagine the impossible.

‘
Yenaraou
bisket
?
’ Worogan said. May I go and fetch the biscuit that is still left?’

He thought he had managed the business of giving them biscuit while leaving a fragment for himself, but they had not missed a single thing. Not about the biscuit. Much less about the fact that
kamara
was not going to stand up for them.

He got the piece of biscuit and tried to amuse them by grimacing and grunting, trying to break it and failing—it was rock-like, he did not have to pretend—until he picked up the hatchet from beside the fire and chopped it into three.

Worogan and Tugear were willing to be amused by his playacting. He was waiting for Tagaran to forgive him.

As he gave her some biscuit he pointed to her finger.

‘
Murra
bidyul
?
’ he asked, hoping this might mean
finger
better?

‘
Bial,
karangun
,’ she said, shaking her head and making a face. Not better but worse, he supposed. Still, she seemed to have accepted that sympathy was as far as he was going to go.

When they had finished their morsels of biscuit, she made a great show of playing hostess, introducing the others to various mysteries of the hut that were new to them. She demonstrated how you made a spark with the flint, showed them how you sharpened the hatchet with the whetstone, she opened the box to show them the sextant. She wagged her finger in warning not to touch and pointed up. As she herself had done the first day, the two girls looked at the shingles, and he watched her give out
a stream of words the meaning of which he was pretty sure was close to,
No, silly, not the roof, the stars!

There were few enough objects in the hut for him to be aware of her avoiding the one in the corner behind the door: his musket. In the absence of enough pegs and shelves, its muzzle had made a convenient spot for him to hook small items of clothing. Most of the time he could forget that it was a weapon, but now he was aware of it there, and of Tagaran ignoring it.

Then Tugear said something and they were off, suddenly, like a flock of those chattering birds that came down to the grass and then all took fright at once.

He watched them clambering up the rocks. Near the top they turned and waved.

‘Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!’

How they seemed to love the sound of that word.

He waved until they had disappeared over the crest of the ridge, and even then went on standing there, looking up.

When he went into the hut he could no longer avoid a glum awareness of failure. What Tagaran had wanted was impossible. He tried it in his mind again: going out to
Charlotte
, knocking on the door of the captain’s cabin, the man looking at him.
Native
girls, you say?

Impossible.

He thought that Tagaran knew all along that it was a test he would fail, and she had forgiven him. It only confirmed
something that she understood already. In this, as in so many things, she was ahead of him.

They all knew what he had turned his face away from: like it or not, he was
Berewalgal
. He wore the red coat. He carried the musket when he was told to. He stood by while a man was flogged. He would not confront a white man who had beaten his friends.

He had been pretending that it was not so. A world existed here in his hut, a world he shared with Tagaran and the others. It was on another orbit altogether from the one he shared with his own kind. But a man could not travel along two different paths. Tagaran knew that. Now he knew it too.

The gloom that had fallen over his day was a fact he had until now denied: that the pleasure he found with Tagaran cast a shadow. He had been brushed by its wing this afternoon, just a touch. It would return. What he shared with Tagaran was the greatest delight he had ever known. But bound up with the delight, inseparable from it, was a universe of impossibility.

T
here was this about Sydney Cove, Rooke thought: at the end of every summer’s day the nor-easter came through, as dependably as if someone out in the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean were paid to open a window. The forest-covered promontories seethed under gusts of wind that darkened the water to gunmetal grey.

Rooke considered destroying the notebooks. He would make a copy that would omit any entries which could be misunderstood and burn the originals. He got as far as sitting at the table and opening a new notebook, but could not make himself go on. To read the entries with an eye for what could be distorted would be to distort them. He would enter that coarse way of looking and be dirtied by it. Making an expurgated version of the notebooks would kill them. Like a stuffed parrot, they
would be real, but not true.

When he saw Barringan threading her way down the rocks, Boneda calling
kamara, kamara
, and Tagaran a shining figure in the sun, he was glad. But he was also aware of something else in his heart. Could you want something, and dread it at the same time? Some powerful conflict of feelings in the vicinity of his chest made him unable to return her greeting.

Today it seemed the children did not want to crowd into the hut. Tagaran went in, though, and as he followed her he could not stop himself looking up at the ridge, dreading to see Silk’s dapper figure.

Tagaran went straight to the corner, removed the handkerchief draped over the end of the musket, and picked it up. He put out a hand to stop her, but she had already got it snugged into her shoulder and her finger was already against the trigger. Now she was pretending that she knew how to squint along its length.

Where had she seen that done? And why had she waited till now to try the thing?

The memory of that first day on the beach came into his mind, clear as an engraving in a frame: Weymark demonstrating the power of the white man’s weapon and himself laughing at the surgeon’s blunt description of what a musket ball might do to a man. Rooke had not really been amused. He wondered now what had possessed him to laugh.

News of that display would have travelled from tribe to
tribe. Tagaran had most likely heard of it. Was she thinking of that picture too?

He smiled in a discouraging way, took the gun from her, put it back in the corner.

But she picked it up again and stuck her finger in the end of the barrel. She was asking,
What makes the shot come out?

The governor had given orders that the marines never let the natives see that it was necessary to put anything into the gun. ‘They must think it is the thing itself, that its effect is as immediate and simple as that of their own lances,’ he had said. ‘For the safety of all of us, do not let them see the loading of it.’

So Rooke shook his head, held up his thumb and asked her what it was called. She was not to be distracted. Her insistence today seemed different from her usual curiosity, when she might want to know how the lid came off the inkwell or what the buckle on a shoe was for.

Or did it only seem different, because of that new shadow over things?

Finally, because he found it so hard to refuse her, he thought to go halfway. Against both his orders and his own dragging reluctance, he got down the bag of shot and emptied a ball out into his palm. She snatched it up, felt it, weighed it and tried it with her teeth before giving it back. Rooke loaded it into the muzzle, wadded it down.

He watched her face, intent on the movement of the ramrod in and out. He could see that she had forgotten that he was
kamara
. For the moment he was nothing more than a conduit for the knowledge she wanted.

His hands knew the movements of this ritual so well he could have loaded the gun with his eyes closed. In Portsmouth they had drilled endlessly, the sergeant calling out the actions one by one. It was incredible to Rooke now, but he had seen in the gun only a marvel of logic and mechanics.

On Tagaran’s face he saw an echo of that fascination, and wanted to say,
There is nothing to admire here
.

He hoped the palaver of loading and wadding the shot would be enough, but Tagaran was not fooled. She pointed to the pan, the duckbill hammer, the flint, demanded to see what they all did, so he showed her how the hammer struck the flint and made a spark. But still she knew there was more, and that it lived in the little bag up on the shelf.

With ceremony and much appearance of care, he opened the bag and shook out a little powder into his palm. He put the pinch of powder on the pan, but did not do the essential thing; there was no powder behind the shot to spit it out along the muzzle.

At least in the letter of the law, he was still on the right side of obedience.

She followed him outside. He expected the women to be there sitting as usual around their fire, Boneda and the other children running about the rocks and up and down from the water, but for once they were nowhere to be seen.

‘Where is Mauberry, where is Boneda?’ he asked Tagaran, but she was not interested in the question, only in seeing what he would do next with the gun.

There was something a little odd, a little unsettling, about the emptiness of the place. Lucky, though, he supposed. The noise he was about to make would have frightened the babies.

Tagaran wanted to stand next to his shoulder, but he made her go back a few yards. She watched, huge-eyed, as he pretended to aim and pulled his finger against the trigger. The flint fell against the steel, the spark fell onto the gunpowder in the pan. She jumped back at the bright flash and screamed, but it was more delight than fear.

He could feel his face stiff around the feelings the sound awoke in him.

‘There,’ he said, swinging the gun down from his shoulder and standing it butt-up on the ground. ‘I have shown you everything, does that make you content?’

But she had not been taken in. She knew he had made noise and light, but that the shot was still in the barrel.

Just for this day, he could have wished her stupid.

With gestures that an imbecile could not have mistaken, she showed him what she wanted: to see the lead ball—she picked up another one to demonstrate—hurtle itself out of the muzzle.

He would not. The noise and the flash were part of the allure of the machine, like fireworks or a person getting a note
out of a tuba. But to shoot a piece of metal out of it that could penetrate a shield or a human body and expose the shambles within: that was of another order of experience, another language. What it said was,
I can kill you
.

He did not want her to learn that language. Certainly not from him.

‘No. I will not.
Bial. Bial
.’

She pouted and cajoled and wheedled. Then she turned to the sulks and called him
tamunalang
, one who refuses, or, he supposed, a churl.

He thought at first it must be a game:
Tagaran gets her own
way
. But still she insisted, grabbing the barrel of the gun and pushing it at him. He was sickened by it: this innocent wanting to play at death.

He thought she must see his misery at handling the gun, at being reminded that he was a soldier, his profession violence. Why did she insist?

‘No! Do not ask, I beg you!’

For this appeal he had no
Cadigal
words. He had never before had to entreat her.

He snatched the thing away from her and put it behind him, out of her reach, then took hold of her wrist to stop her taking it again. Her arm was as thin as a twig, but strong. He could feel the sinewy power of it.

‘Come, girl,’ he cried at last. ‘Do not insist! I have said no!’

He could hear the anger in his voice, and she heard it too. She answered it with a flow of vehement words, spitting them out at him. He let her go and she took a step back. They watched each other. Suddenly it was no game.

He was bewildered. He had never thought to use his strength against her, or to speak to her in anger.

He watched her face, tightened against him, half hidden by her hair, her chin obstinate. He did not understand what had happened, except that it had to do with the wretched gun. He might as well have let it off. Something had been bent out of shape by his anger as surely as it would have been by shooting.

She turned away towards the door. He took a step after her.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said to her back. ‘
Parribugo
. Will you come again tomorrow?’

She spoke without looking at him.

‘
Kamara
, goodbye.’

What a terrible word that was. He could not say it in return. It was a word like a knife.

‘
Parribugo
. I will be here.
Parribugo!
’

But she had gone. He watched her climb up the track, her long skinny legs moving tirelessly over the rocks. He was waiting for her to turn around. He would wave for her to come back. He would run up the track to join her.

But she did not turn.

When she had gone, Rooke sat down on the side of his bed. His legs were trembling and he could feel an obstacle in his throat, as if part of him were trying to get out.

The smell of gunpowder still hung in the air from the pinch he had exploded for her. The smell made him feel panicked and muddled.

Why did Tagaran want to know how to fire a gun?

He found his mind suggesting an answer. How would it be—just to speculate—if Tagaran had been chosen by the natives to learn the language of the great-distance-off-people? To learn their ways? Even, perhaps, to make sense of the marks on paper that were so significant to them? To understand all their private inner workings of intellect, custom, belief and feeling?

And, perhaps, to find out how the guns worked. Their powers, their limitations. How they might be countered by men with spears and wooden shields.

A clever child like Tagaran was the perfect choice: quick to learn, but innocent. Curious, full of questions, but only a child. He thought of the way she absorbed words on a single hearing, made sense of entire sentences with amazing speed. She had learned more than she had ever taught him.

He had begun by thinking of Tagaran as a resource. He thought he had appointed her his teacher. He had been made too confident by his own ambition.

Brutally, he made himself face the last thought: he had been flattered by her friendship.

Now, to put it plain, it seemed that he was the one who had been used.

It hurt to have been taken for a fool. But that was not the pain in his throat, the constricted feeling, as if he were no longer sure how to breathe. The hurt that was choking him was that she had not enjoyed his company, after all. She had valued him only for what he could give her.

Which was how he had begun by thinking of her. Until now, when it was perhaps too late.

The next day, after the noon readings, Rooke set off up the track. At the top of the ridge he did not go down towards the settlement but in the opposite direction, towards the bay on the other side, the one called Long Cove. He had often seen the smoke rising there, and Tagaran had told him how the cockles and thick mud oysters loved the still water of that narrow bay. Once he had gone with her as far as a big rock from which the camp could be seen: a couple of bark shelters, a patch of cleared earth, a fire. She had made it clear that he should not go further, and he had not insisted. He had thought there would be other days, other opportunities.